Forty years ago as a graduate student I wrote a book about Spaghetti Westerns, called 10,000 Ways to Die. It's an embarrassing tome: full of half-assed semiotics and other attenuated academic nonsense.Thirty years later I wrote an entirely new book with the same title, about the same subject, from a different perspective - that...

1922 was a year of great turbulence and upheaval. Its events reverberated throughout the rest of the twentieth century and still affect us today, 100 years later. In a sequence of vividly written sketches, Nick Rennison conjures up all the drama and diversity of an extraordinary year....

1974 was a year of major changes around the world. The roots of many aspects of today's societies which we take for granted lie in the 1970s and particularly in this, the pivotal year of the decade....

From Agatha Christie and Patricia Highsmith to Val McDermid and JK Rowling, After Agatha is an indispensable guide to women's crime writing over the last century and an exploration of why women read crime...

An informed, engaging and accessible introduction to the Christie phenomenon, examining all her novels and short stories. This edition has been updated to include new material on all recent film, TV and literary adaptations....

Since its final episode aired, the acclaimed crime drama The Wire has only become more popular and influential. The issues it tackled, from the failures of the drug war and criminal justice system to systemic bias in law enforcement and other social institutions, have become more urgent and central to the national conversation....

Shanghai in 1935 is a 20th century Babylon where fortunes are made and lost. Into this cultural melting pot, Rowland Sinclair arrives from Sydney to represent his brother at international wool negotiations. The black sheep of the family, Rowland is under strict instructions to commit to nothing - but a brutal murder makes that...

Sherlock Holmes is the most famous of all fictional detectives but, across the Atlantic, he had plenty of rivals. Between 1890 and 1920, American writers created dozens and dozens of crime-solvers. This thrilling, unusual anthology features stories about 15 of them, including Professor Augustus SFX Van Dusen, 'The Thinking Machine',...

Andrei Tarkovsky is the most celebrated Russian filmmaker since Eisenstein, and one of the most important directors to have emerged during the 1960s and 70s. Although he made only seven features, each one was a major landmark in cinema, the most well-known of them being the mediaeval epic Andrei Rublev - widely regarded as one...

A mind-bending thriller blending hard-boiled detective fiction, supernatural horror, and metaphysical noir that takes readers on a macabre journey into the occult, from mid-fifties New York to Paris to the Vatican, as private investigator Harry Angel, seeking both answers about his true identity and revenge, hunts down Satan...

Ronald Decker guilty of a first offence, minor drug dealing charge is put away in San Quentin where he is befriended by "old lag", Earl Copen. Copen is well in with the White Brotherhood just one of the many White, Black and Chicano gangs in constant brutal conflict in San Quentin. Their growing friendship is tested by Ron's rejection...

This guide to anime offers an overview of the art form, looking at its development in Japan and its export to other cultures. It includes a history of Japanese animation from early examples to the relaunch of animation as a viable commercial entity and its enormous rise in popularity after WWII. Anime explains the difference between...